The YouBike Public Transportation System: A Small Wonder in Taiwan

I swipe my MRT card across the YouBike release mechanism, raise the seat to its highest level, and prepare to bike to my thrice-weekly swimming practice. If I were not going here, I would be taking the bike to Carrefour for groceries, or off to my daughter’s favourite local school, maybe off to my own school (National Taipei University of Business), on a ride through the riverside park that fronts our home, or other common journeys. I, like many other citizens in Taiwan, use YouBike almost daily, and it has become a public transportation and cultural phenomenon in Taiwan – pretty much as common as using the MRT subway, and a lot more fun. Kate Lin (林雅婷), a resident in Taipei, commented on the value and convenience of YouBikes, saying “I enjoy doing this because I don’t get much chance to exercise during the week.” Riding YouBikes, she goes on, “is faster than [a bus]” (Taipei Times, 26 November 2012). To be sure, I have found that YouBikes are even faster than the MRT subway.

The YouBike bike sharing system is a small wonder in Taiwan, and similar sharing systems are now seen everywhere else around the world. By 2022, approximately 3,000 cities worldwide offered bike-sharing systems, as far abroad as Dubai, New York, Paris, Mexico City, Montreal and Barcelona (the first was launched in 1965 in Amsterdam; the first in Taiwan was created in Taipei City in 2009; China too employs a bike-sharing system). This has all changed life for the better across nations, offering up a convenient transportation choice that is easy to use, and oh-so inexpensive. Bikes of course are not for everybody, but for the physically capable these bikes have provided a new lease on personal carriage. Swipe a card, climb aboard, and off you go. YouBikes are now available across Taiwan, in Taipei, Taoyuan, Hsinchu, Miaoli, Taichung, Chiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung County.

The YouBike 1.0 system, founded in 2009, was elevated to YouBike 2.0 in 2020, and the new system offers up even better bike models, the allowance of cell phones to rent, and other features I much approve of – including that the bike seats are now much easier to raise and lower, the new warning bells are much more stable and usable, and an easy-on riser built into the rental racks makes returning bikes much easier. Even the rental kiosks near rental racks have English usage, which has helped me a lot. And to be sure, the bright white front lights, and red rear lights, make the bikes safer, day and night. I wish Giant would offer a feature that would remind riders to remember to empty the basket on the front of the bike after usage. At least two or three times I have walked away and left some important items behind (a student once told me he walked off and left a laptop computer in the basket, which luckily he recovered with police help). Free usage for the first half hour is still used, another convenience (though I have noticed that often the system often still charges you NT$5, even when you have used the bike less than one-half hour; a small inconvenience).

As of February 2023, there were a total of 1,582 YouBike 1.0 rental stations and 5,246 YouBike 2.0 rental stations across Taiwan, in the cities noted above (Taoyuan introduced an extra 100 YouBike stations in March 2024). There have been a total of 653 million rentals thus far, a number that all can see is rising daily. The 2.0 system is gradually replacing 1.0 (Taipei has moved wholly to 2.0), and there is even a 2.0E system, with electric bikes with a dramatic new look, but I have only seen these occasionally. The Taipei Times reported on 29 April 2013 that the original 1.0 system was a “victim of its own success” and that users had reported problems renting or returning bikes, but this appears to have been corrected with 2.0. Taipei City is watching the system closely, and has introduced a demerit system for riders who run red lights, cycle the wrong way on a road, use a cellphone while riding, fail to yield to pedestrians, and other violations.

YouBikes are high-quality Giant models, which must be used with care and safety. But that is probably exactly what most users do. I have never had any sort of accident on a YouBike, and I hope to continue with this record. Just today I rode a YouBike to my job at NTUB, a new habit of mine (and as noted I regularly use YouBike for all sorts of other destinations). For users, be safe and happy when using a YouBike, and, like I do, welcome this delightful development in life and transportation culture in Taiwan.